A theme for Scott Fitzgerald

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

'She lov'd me for the dangers I had pass'd, And. I lov'd her that she did pity them.'

Othello, Act 1.

H. L. Mencken said, rather blasphemously, of the abdication of King Edward VIII, 'It's the greatest story since the Resurrection.' The Onassis-Kennedy marriage is hardly in that - class, but it certainly provided an immense amount of material for gossip, censorious or friendly, speculation about the attitude of the Vatican, speculation about the fate of Cardinal Cushing and about the private, or not so pri- vate past of Callas.

The sense of shock that so many people in America and out of it felt at the remarriage of Mrs Kennedy reveals what an important symbolic role she had, possibly inalgre elle, assumed. The role was extremely difficult. 'She and her husband, with or without justification, were' emblems of hope in a world in which hope was in short supply. Compare them with Mr and Mrs Khrushchev, Mr and Mrs Mac- millan or, later, with Mr and Mrs Wilson! Even the romance of the Earl of Home giving up his ancient earldom did not stir much in- terest. But everything that the Kennedys did was newsworthy, and some of it was admirable if not necessarily important, and some of it was important.

Of course, in America the impact was far greater. Washington under the Eisenhowers was as dull as the Washington I first knew under the Coolidges. It was one large golf course and golf club-house. The President had many virtues and performgd some useful public ser- vices, but General Eisenhower was no romantic figure. Still less was his wife. As for his cabinet, some members of it were positively repulsive, like Mr Dulles. Only 'Engine Charlie' Wilson, the bumbling Secretary of Defence, won any affection, and he won by his very defects. 'I like Charlie Wilson,' said a very eminent journalist to me, 'he is the only member of the Administration who never mentions God.'

The arrival of the Kennedys in the White House, in a snowstorm which could not stop the almost endless prayers of Cardinal Cush- ing, was a new birth of freedom, or at any rate of life. As Admiral Morison was to point out, the Kennedys made of the White House what John Quincy Adams had hoped to make it. It was a centre of culture, of gaiety as well as of power. Of course, there was a certain amount of bogusness about all of this except the power. I can remember introducing one of the closest intimates of the dead President to one of the most important members of the staff of Prime Minister Wilson. The exile from the White House remarked that -the Ken- nedys had given far fewer parties than the public imagined, but that they were extremely well publicised. The eminence -grise of 10 Downing Street remarked sourly, 'I don't know how many parties they gave, but they gave more than my boss : he gives none.' All that came to an end, and the world imposed on Mr; Kennedy an almost intolerable role.

It is very difficult to play the role of a former President of the United States. (NI, Truman once rebuked me severely for referrine to an 'ex-President.' There was, he said, no such thing.) Still more difficult was the role of a President's widow, made a widow by assas sination. The role had been very unsatisfactorily fulfilled by Mrs Lincoln and Mrs McKinley. as indeed their role as the First Lady ha been unsatisfactorily fulfilled; and Mrs Gar- field was in the White House far too short time to make any impression for good or ill.

The real parallel with Mrs Kennedy ‘1,3 of course, Queen Victoria after the death o Prince Albert. It seems to have been forgotte that Mrs Kennedy is now only two yea younger than Queen Victoria was when Albe ascended to heaven, and although the Quee abandoned nearly all her representational func tions and became extremely unpopular as result of this abdication, she had political func tions to carry out, which she did ye grudgingly and with very little consideratio for her ministers, and this, with innumerabl letters, at least occupied her time. Mrs Ken nedy had no such official role to play. M Kennedy, as much as Queen Victoria, was member of a dynasty. The member of dynasty closest to her was Robert Kennedy and I, with no inside knowledge, am willin to accept the case that the murder of Bobb Kennedy was the last straw. She may well hal wanted to cut herself away from that murdero political world in which she had never felt real at home. In some ways Mrs Kennedy neglect her social functions as much as Queen Vic toria, even when she was in the White Ho In an innocent way she was too snobbi for her job. It was not a matter of mere sod snobbery. She simply round politics bore and politicians' wives even more boring Oa their husbands. She was beginning to lea the trade and to have some slight taste f

it when she went to Dallas; but she could hardly be blamed for disliking the world into which she had moved and in which she had suffered so much.

There were, of course, stories, some of them ill-natured, about the cultural pretensions of the White House. The President was supposed to have commented ironically on Casals's cello as his 'bull fiddle.' His wife is supposed to have said that the only piece of music her hus- band liked was the presidential hymn, 'Hail to the Chief.' (Few Americans seem to realise that the libretto of this rather drab tune is lifted from The Lady of the Lake.). But some of the White House parties were of a kind totally unknown in the White House, at any rate since the days of Theodore Roose- velt. There was gaiety and some aesthetic sense which was exercised with plenty of art. One of the few times when I have ever scored at an American social gathering was when I was asked had I seen Mrs Kennedy's guided tour of the reformed White House on tele- vision? I said I hadn't, and was asked had I seen the reformed White House? I said, 'Yes,' and when asked who had shown me over it, I was able to reply, 'Mrs Kennedy's husband.' But Mrs Kennedy might have quoted that most beautiful lamentation for the ending of youth and happiness which afflicted the young Countess Almaviva, a good deal younger than Mrs Kennedy.

There was plenty of cattishness about the Kennedy menage among people who didn't 'make' the White House circle, or disliked the Kennedys as Catholics, as Democrats, as new rich, or for a dozen other reasons. But except in the darkest South, there was general admiration for her and general sympathy with her in her ordeal and in the difficult job of surviving it. Even when she was being most criticised when she was the First Lady, I noticed that the criticism came usually from ladies a little older than she was. It was very seldom joined in by men of any age, and very seldom joined in by young women, for whom Mrs Kennedy was a model of elegance, grace and charm. And she was a model in all these ways.

1 do not think there would have been much resentment over Mrs Kennedy's marrying again. There would have been some—a great many of the young female devotees of her cult would probably have disliked the idea of her marry- ing anybody else, for her husband had been the object of a cult as much as his wife. A great many of the critics of King Edward VIII were young women or not-so-young women who really disliked his marrying anybody, even a non-American.

It is certainly hard to find a parallel for the marriage with Mr Aristotle Onassis. He was not a very plausible King Cophetua and Mrs Kennedy was far, of course, from being a beggar maid. A marriage with Lord Harlech would have pleased the American public much more. And the marriage with such a very anomalous non-American as Mr Onassis prob- ably did threaten the national pride of American manhood, and was seen as an insult to a great deal of the pompous matriarchy of American wealthy life. The dislike of the Ken- nedys on a more opulent level was one of the disagreeable features of American life before and after the assassination. But in a rather sour article in Time magazine there is a clue

to this extraordinary marriage. Muratis mutandis, Mr Onassis is, in fact, Jay Githby, and the lesson of The Great Gatsby is the inbred corruption of the very rich and the deep immorality of settling back into the life of the very rich at the sacrifice of love.

The narrator makes us feel that the only tolerable character in the cast of The Great Gatsby is Gatsby himself. He makes us feel that, in Daisy Buchanan's flight from love, she descended to the base level of her hus. band; that Fitzgerald was again repeatinv his famous dictum that 'the rich are different from us.' But there is, of course, one important obstacle to this theory. Mr Onassis is a very rich Gatsby with a far more secure basis for his fortune than Gatsby had. And I see no reason why it should not be true, as apparently Cardinal Cushing thinks it is true, that this was a genuine love match.

Perhaps Mr Onassis, brought up in the desperate collapse of the Hellenic civilisation of the Ionian shore, represents more genuinely than any of the Texas oil millionaires who are in effect his partners the spirit of the frontier and the spirit of the Alamo. The whole story may provide a theme for a new Henry James, a new Scott Fitzgerald. But once the shock is assimilated and once Mrs Onassis resumes her new role in America, she will have many more good wishes than, perhaps, she is getting at the present time. Indeed, in a year or two's time, perhaps the only permanent and important consequences of this marriage will be more trouble for the unfortunate Paul VI. It is, perhaps, he who needs our sympathy more than either the newly married couple or than the Kennedy family.